The website was created to provide a source of free stock photos for personal or commercial use. It features a user-friendly interface that allows users to easily browse and search for images by category or keyword. The images on the site are organized into various categories, such as animals, nature, travel, and more. Piqsels is a website that offers a wide range of high-quality free stock photos and illustrations that can be used for personal or commercial projects without any attribution required. The images on Piqsels are submitted by various photographers and artists from around the world, and cover a diverse range of topics such as nature, food, technology, business, and more.
AI is revolutionizing most online spaces, and stock photos are no exception. With the advent of generative AI, it’s possible to feed your exact specifications into an AI image generator like Midjourney and get a unique, often sophisticated, result. The ability to generate fresh new photos that match your exact needs might mean stock photos will soon become a thing of the past. For food bloggers and content creators in the restaurant space, Foodiesfeed is a must-have.
Canva
Any decent web designer or content creator spends a sizeable amount of their life looking for the perfect images for their sites. High-quality stock photography can easily be accessed online, but often these pictures get very expensive, which can be a hindrance to those operating on a tight budget (or no budget at all). If you’re looking for some professional quality photos, freestocks.org is a good place to begin your search. Freestock’s catalog has been created mainly by three photographers with full-time jobs who create the catalog in their free time. So the offering might not be as large, but it’s completely free, and each photo has clearly been taken by someone who understands lighting, editing, and composition.
As I was testing, I noticed that many stock photo websites have pivoted to AI-only photos, while others offer AI-generated pictures alongside standard stock photos. For the purposes of this article, I disqualified sites that offer only AI-generated images, but kept an eye out for those that offer a mix of both. And I gave bonus points to sites that incorporated AI tools—including image generation—in a useful way. This huge, and still growing, collection of images by creator Viktor Hanácek is easy to navigate and features free stock photos that mostly don’t require attribution. The site is funded entirely by ads, which allow it to keep running and for Viktor to travel the world and take his photos.
Other stock photo sites to consider
They also opened up submissions so other photographers could upload their own free stock photos. The photos on Flickr are known for containing rich metadata, including geolocation information, EXIF data, tags, and more. So if you want to find photos taken in France, select the World Map under the Explore dropdown, and click on one of the pink dots that pop up in that country.
The site serves as something of a portfolio for professional photographers, so photo attribution is pretty common when using someone’s work, although it’s not required. StockSnap.io is a free stock image site created by the same team behind graphic design tool Snappa. The search function is user friendly and lets you sort by popularity, views, downloads, favorites, and more.
Free Stock Video
It hosts an abundance of brilliant high-resolution photos, vectors, and illustrations, is easy to navigate with high-functioning search features, and best of all – it’s absolutely free. You have the option to either browse as a guest or get a free membership, which will allow you to bypass the Captcha. Most images need no attribution, but make sure you check for each one you use, as there are a few exceptions. Shutterstock is a leading provider of licensed stock images, vectors, illustrations, and music for businesses and consumers around the world. It has a growing community of more than one million creators and adds hundreds of thousands of creative assets every day. Designerspics is a website that offers free high-quality photos for personal and commercial use.
You can also narrow down the content type, filter by price or file type, and even choose to exclude (or isolate for) AI-generated images. Whether you use a free stock site or pay for higher-quality photos, be sure to read any copyright restrictions carefully, so you understand what you can and can’t do with the media you choose. If it seems too good to be true, you may end up paying a higher price later. If you’re on the hunt for photos with impeccable color palettes, composition, and impressive use of negative space, you’ll find more than a few on Kaboompics. This site was founded by talented photographer Karoline Grabowska and has over 17,000 exquisite photos, many of which are in the interior design and lifestyle category. Rawpixel searches for original digital collections all over the world to fuel its free collection, and the results are bursting with creativity and authenticity.
Death to Stock Photo
The library is built by user submissions and reflects a trendy, modern style you can use for your projects, free from any copyright restrictions. Another popular site for creators looking for high-quality photos and stock videos is Pixabay. Pixabay has over 2.6 million high-quality images and videos free for personal and commercial purposes. The site is easy to use and has quality filters to help you find what you’re looking for.
- Keyword tagging is very basic on the site and in many cases, a photo has only one tag.
- In addition to the free resources, Vecteezy also offers a huge collection of photos, videos, and vectors that can be purchased with download credits or through a Pro subscription.
- You could also check out VistaCreate, another web-based graphic design tool that offers over a million stock photos, even on the free plan.
- It’s easy to navigate and has a number of great categories that work for many different kinds of businesses.
- IM Creator is an online website building tool, but they also put together a small library of premium photos for use in your designs.
Stockvault is a website that provides a large collection of free stock photos, graphics, and other digital assets. It was founded in 2004 by a group of photographers and designers who wanted to provide a platform where people could find and use high-quality images for personal and commercial projects. Kaboompics is another popular free stock image site, with more than 20,000 photos. It’s owned by one photographer/entrepreneur and has a stock photo license that covers both personal and commercial purposes without attribution (although it’s appreciated).
It’s one of the oldest stock photo archives out there and derives its name from what people in production would call an inactive file—used only for reference. It’s super easy to use and has a great catalog of real everyday sorts of images that you can pull from. Freerange is a standard free stock image site with a library of images ready to download. The collections span topics like backgrounds and textures, animals and insects, technology, and vintage photos.
Built by the Leeroy creative agency, Life of Pix offers true-to-life high-resolution stock images for download. It has thousands of stock photos, including everything from food and people to architecture and textures. The site regularly adds 10 new photos from a handpicked photographer best stock photography for designers of the week. All copyright-free images are available for commercial use, but some restrictions apply for distributors. Stocksy.com is a website that offers royalty-free stock photos and videos that are high-quality and curated by a community of photographers and artists.
Using free images for your website
To date, over one billion images, video clips, and music tracks have been downloaded on Shutterstock. Though its business model is to charge for images and videos, it has a library of over 300 million free stock images. Explore this list of the 36 best free stock photo sites and find the perfect fit.